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Friday, November 30, 2012

Is Blair Waldorf a Feminist? (Gossip Girl)

As promised on Wednesday, today we tackled one of the great
questions of our time. Is Blair Waldorf, Queen of the Upper East Side and
generally admitted bitch, a feminist?

If you’ve ever seen the show Gossip Girl, you probably had an instinctual reaction either way.
Blair is not a character who inspires lukewarm feelings of apathy. No, she’s
more of the heads on spikes type. Everyone has an opinion. But before we get
into that, let’s talk about the show.

Gossip Girl is a
long-running CW show based on the even longer running book series. Weirdly, the
show is actually better than the books (I think, at least), and features some
very notable changes. For the record. It follows the lives of privileged,
insulated Upper East Side kids, starting when they were in high school, and now
following them into their adult lives. The kids all went to the same school and
are in the same circles, circles that are defined by intermarriage, infidelity,
and rivalry, so just like real life. There were also a couple of poor kids
thrown in to keep it interesting, but those characters are either rich or
written out by now.

Mostly involving the emotional relationships and tumultuous
lives of our heroes, the show featured a slight gimmick where all of our
characters were stalked by a gossip site – Gossip Girl. They don’t know who GG
is until way into the series (and even then it makes absolutely no sense), but
it’s there just so that the voiceover (Kristen Bell) can give a quippy little
recap in each episode. Handy, that.

Okay. But who is Blair Waldorf in all of this?

Well, in the beginning at least, she’s the bad guy. The show
ostensibly follows Serena Van Der Woodsen (Blake Lively) a reformed bad girl
just back from boarding school, who used to be Blair’s (Leighton Meester) best
friend. Since Serena up and left Blair right when Blair was in a very hard
point in her life and never said a word about it (and also slept with Blair’s
boyfriend), Blair is a little pissed. We’re supposed to root for Serena and her
new paramour, Dan (Penn Badgely), while booing Blair’s evil scheming ways.

The problem was, most of the viewers actually really liked
Blair. And it’s hard not to. Her best friend was a gorgeous Amazonian blonde
who slept with her boyfriend and flounced off to Europe while Blair’s parents
got a divorce and her world fell apart. Then said blonde flounces back and
proceeds to get everything handed to her on a silver platter, while Blair has
to struggle and strive. It was really hard not to love Blair and her obsession
with old movies, spying on people, and the headbands. Also Dorota. So Blair
quickly became a popular character, and the show had to deal with the fact that
Serena’s a little hard to like.

None of this, though, is super relevant to the issue of
feminism.

Now, an argument could be, and has been, made that Blair is
actually an anti-feminist character. The reason for this is that Blair is an
unabashed romantic who really really wants to be a society wife and eventually
matron. She wants to marry rich and become a grande-dame of society. It’s a
little weird for a sixteen year old to want that, but whatever.

It’s notable, though, because for the longest time on the
show, Blair doesn’t really have a goal besides finding a husband. She wants
Chuck or Nate or some other guy in her life (Marcus, Dan, insert other here).
She wants to get married and start her life. Sounds a bit unfeminist to me.

The reason we can’t just write her off, though, is that
Blair doesn’t wait for her life to
happen to her. She doesn’t wait to meet Mr. Right. If she wants something, she
runs at it full speed. To quote her, “Destiny is for losers. It’s just a stupid
excuse to wait for things to happen instead of making them happen.”

That’s pretty feminist.

Whether or not her goals are something you can agree with,
Blair goes about her life in an unabashedly feminist way. By this I mean that
you can never argue that Blair Waldorf is not the acting agent of her own
destiny. Life does not happen to her. She happens to other people. So even when
she’s scheming to get a husband, she’s still the principle actor in her story,
which makes her a much more active agent than Serena ever is, and far more than
most Disney Princesses. Blair is feminist because Blair tries and does.

She’s also feminist because she never ever settles. Her
romantic past is pretty rocky, and she’s dated a lot of guys, even married a
couple. But the reason it looks so much like a battlefield back there is simply
because she refuses to settle for anything less than the best. What could be
more feminist than demanding that the person you commit to be worthy of that
commitment? She’s romantic, sure, but she’s also practical. And she knows that
when it comes to marriage, you want to make sure the shoe really fits.

What I’m saying is that, yeah, Blair Waldorf is a feminist,
she’s just not a feminist we’re used to seeing. Yes, she’s obsessed with
getting married, and yeah, she can be really manipulative and mean. But neither
of those things make her anti-feminist. What they make her is interesting.

Feminism doesn’t mean refusing to shave your armpits and
driving a Suburu (fabulous cars though they are). Being a feminist means,
simply, insisting that you have equal rights under the law, equal opportunities
insofar as they can be regulated, equal pay, and the chance to be the acting
agent in your own life. That’s it.

So, yes, Blair Waldorf is a feminist. But if you ask her to
wear flannel, she’ll probably have you executed.

I love that even though she was a trust fund kid and "privileged" we saw her working hard for her future. Blair in the books and on the show had a 4.0 GPA, took AP classes, had extracurricular activities, and aced the SAT to make sure that she got into her dream university. While all Serena had to do was make it into Page 6 (gossip column). Blair finds out what she needs to know to impress before interviews and what connections she to forge.

I love that Little J admired Blair instead of Serena because she saw the effort that Blair made to have the best life she could. I liked that while Blair was spoiled it was Serena that acted entitled. Blair realized she liked living a certain way and would do what it took to maintain that lifestyle or even improve upon it while Serena just expected that lifestyle to continue. Who else but Serena could get hired as a consultant for a movie adaptation of a book she never even read? If it was Blair, she would've read the book, biographies on the author, and historical accounts of that era to make it more authentic.

I love that Blair didn't just go with the flow and expect things to work out. She realized that only a certain amount of people from her school would get accepted to the college she wanted to attend and sabotaged her rivals. She straddled the line between cutthroat and compassionate.

Even the reason she loves old movies ties in to her need for control. She knows exactly how those movies end and what will happen in every scene. She dreams in black and white film. She sees her life as a movie and herself as the star and does everything she can to learn the tropes so that she's both the protagonist and the director.

I think that a lot consider her not to be a feminist because of her relationship with Chuck. They see it as abusive and because she chose to go back to him and he was her endgame they think it sends a message that abuse is okay.

But I don't think it was that simple. So few shows actually voice the emotional, psychological, or physical abuse inside a ship but GG did with Chuck & Blair. She flat out told Chuck "I would do anything for you and maybe that's wrong" and that she didn't want to play games because she wanted "real pure love". She left him whenever she felt mistreated or no longer could recognize the strong woman she knew she was and didn't accept flowers and "I'm sorrys" from him. She had to see real change and genuine vulnerability and honesty from him.